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Topic: Beware importers labels (Read 1262 times)

Sklounion

Hi,As someone with some experience of the confusion that importers labels, and some re-sellers labels can cause......There has been a rash of items, mainly US-based on eBay, which bear a label for the US importer Weil.Most of those attached to any piece of Czechoslovakian glass bear the legend "Barolac".This a.m., un-named correspondent, posted me a link to an auction.Hoffman marked glass, frosted, bearing Weil Barolac label.This is NOT a Barolac item, the Hoffmann mark tells us so. If pre WWII, Hoffmann would not agree to it being marked with a Barolac label.IMHO, we are looking at post-WWII production, probably by Jablonecke Sklarny, and exported to the US by Jablonex, not Glassexport. The item is not an Inwald product, so therefore cannot possibly be Barolac.I am getting rather tired, of the over-heavy reliance on importers labels to prove country of origin, or range. Heppner (London) Limited are one of the few with fairly accurate labels.

Increasingly, as a research issue, importers labels are worthless.If a documented Hoffmann item turns up labelled as Barolac, then the Inwald attribution is irrelevant. it would never have happened.

Sklounion

Hi, Sorry I worded this poorly. As a research tool, importers labels may be worthless.As a research issue, then as you rightly point out, Frank, we need some-one to do a Hartmann of importers. Huge topic.

One major difficulty would be the number of importers who have closed. Sadly, there is no obligation, to national archives in the UK, for any accountancy firm to place the paper-work after company liquidation, with county records offices. Thus, even where a company may have been a significant employer, or sole operator in a particular field, the papers can just end up in a skip.

Earlier this decade, the BBC (Radio 4) broadcast an excellent series of programmes on British companies which had been in existence for three hundred years or more. I have no idea if their paper-work would be any better protected, but surely its about time the NA, or the Historical Documents Commission were given greater opportunities to say whether they want this type of document.

That would create a paper mountain way beyond the capacity of any organisation. The cost of paper archives is tremendous, the cost of digitising even higher. That ignoring the fact that for companies operating in the last, say 60-70 years, used cheap fast decaying paper. Average life of such a piece of paper is under twenty years even when stored in good conditions. On top of that it would require indexing filing and some means of servicing access. Museums archives are constantly being plundered by people viewing them so most are mow incomplete.

For the UK, you would need an organisation capable of managing ten times the current British Library and even they cannot cope with their archives.

At the end of the day, the only solution is for collectors to make contact with existing companies and try and make arrangements with them. How many companies would be willing? Due to commercial considerations?

Some of the largest companies do have such archives, a few years ago I did a study for one such. As part of a reorganisation they needed to integrate several offices into a new location with insufficient space for their archives unless digitised. These were considered commercially sensitive and special arrangements were needed to maintain security. We are talking here about only a few million pieces of paper that are mostly standard size. The project I put together had an estimate of ten million Euros. For a country the size of the UK with a fairly high number of companies twinkling through existence each year the likely cost would be in the region of 500,000,000,000 Euros of a few years. On the plus side that would translate into several thousand permanent jobs.

Even if it was done there are further complications, data protection and personal data rules would need to be applied limiting effectivity and most digital archives will automatically delete material at various intervals, but most after 3 or 5 years. Despite this the growth of digital archives, globally, is expected to reach into PetaBytes during the current decade.

One small governmental organisation I recently initiated an archiving project for has around 100 staff with growth expected to around 200. They have decided not to use automatic deletion with reviews after 3 or 5 years. I warned them that in 5 years they would need a large staff dedicated to reviewing documents flagged for deletion, thousands per day. I am certain they will change their minds within two years as even their existing data once fully digitised will result in over 1,000 deletions per day by then. They are lucky in that they do not also have to give a right of access to their archive for the general public as many government departments do.

Goverment offices in India store all of their paper, each archiving room is piled from floor to ceiling, has an archivist and a soldier on guard. Keeps plenty of people in work but as salaries grow.... Meanwhile their archives are also supporting millions of insects.